Consumer demand for high-quality, low-latency delivery of streaming multimedia and/or other rich digital content associated with services, such as interactive broadcasting, massively multiplayer online gaming, targeted advertisement insertion, video-on-demand, and the like, is increasingly motivating service providers to develop new, more diverse and complex broadband services. In general, however, service providers that compete to provide such content-based services within (or over) core networking infrastructures of, for example, the Internet, are struggling to meet the growing quality of service (e.g., guaranteed availability, high bit rate, low error probability, etc.) demands associated with these emerging services. Even though a few conventional approaches to providing such content-based services have surfaced, such as strategically located (e.g., geographically dispersed) content delivery networks (CDN), centralized CDN-like platform systems, etc., these approaches have merely alleviated the quality of service requirements and remain wrought with aggregately inefficient, high-cost, and scalably challenged solutions that are able to pacify, but unable to quench the ever growing consumer demand for more bandwidth, higher reliability, and feature rich content-based services.
Therefore, there is a need for an approach that can effectively and efficiently provide content delivery that is also capable of supporting a diversity of existing and emerging content-based services.